Next Nvidia GeForce series is RTX 2080. Not GTX 1180.

[Rumpy]

It's going to be a hard sell for Ray Tracing. The PS5 and Xbox Next (?) won't have hardware that supports that feature, so the amount of games that would utilize it would be really, really, small. That's why I'd rather buy another GTX 1080 (people are already dumping them on ebay for under $400) and do sli.

Is SLI a thing still? From what I remember it was never really supported that well. With double the hardware you'd think the gains would be way higher (iirc, the numbers weren't impressive).

[gameoverDude]

It's going to be a hard sell for Ray Tracing. The PS5 and Xbox Next (?) won't have hardware that supports that feature, so the amount of games that would utilize it would be really, really, small. That's why I'd rather buy another GTX 1080 (people are already dumping them on ebay for under $400) and do sli.

I know. I'm not jumping into the 2080 right away. Even the vanilla 1080 is a great card at this time- I'll keep it around a few months more, at least.
Should I go for the RTX, it'll be a Ti.

[gamevet]

Is SLI a thing still? From what I remember it was never really supported that well. With double the hardware you'd think the gains would be way higher (iirc, the numbers weren't impressive).

The last time that I ran sli was with a pair of GTX 460s. They performed better than a single GTX 580. There have been issues with some DX12 games, but patches did remedy that issue. DOOM uses Vulkan (doesn't support multi-card setups), which runs better than playing the game using open GL and sli. It's probably going to be a case where 20% of the games won't see a benefit, but since 4K (I'm running 1440p/144hz) takes a lot more power than a single GTX 1080Ti to maintain 60fps, the support is still available for a multi GPU setup.

[Frogacuda]

The reveal for this was way more interesting than I thought it would be. It's been common knowledge that they wanted Ray-tracing to be an important selling point of these new cards, but I didn't expect them to be quite so heavily optimized for it, nor the extent to which this is meant to be a mainstream feature used in gaming, evidently boasting something like a 10x increase in ray-tracing ability over the last-gen. They showed it off in games like Tomb Raider, Metro, and Battlefield, and it is clearly a huge paradigm shift.

That's saying a lot because gains in gaming graphics seem to be a game of inches these days, with the difference between dialing up settings often appearing quite minor. But this is pretty night and day when it comes to things like lighting and reflection, which are fundamental parts of what makes a scene look realistic.

What we haven't seen is how it stacks up to the last gen for traditional rendering, or how much of a performance hit the ray-tracing is going to be. But if it can do ray-tracing at comparable performance to the last gen without, I think that's a pretty big deal.

[kedawa]

It's certainly nice to see something beyond just more of the same.

Now if they can just get fire, water, and smoke to look believable, I could actually take claims of realistic video game graphics seriously.

[gamevet]

Holy fuck! Screw you GTX 1080, I'm saving up for a RTX 2070. *Edit* I just received an email from Nvidia to pre-order the RTX cards. They want $600 for an RTX 2070.

Nvidia is also upping support for sli, but will that include their last generation cards.

[Frogacuda]

It doesn't look to me like these cards are going to be a huge performance upgrade for traditional raster rendering. The 2070 seems to have slightly less compute than the 1070Ti for example. While the ray-tracing stuff is pretty compelling, it remains to be seen how well supported it will be. Despite nVidia's implications that it will be easy to support, I imagine fundamental changes to the rendering model are going to also involve the artists re-lighting a lot of scenes, which could be a heavy lift, and slow adoption.

I'm interested but I'm probably going to wait 6 months for the dust to settle.

[gamevet]

It doesn't look to me like these cards are going to be a huge performance upgrade for traditional raster rendering. The 2070 seems to have slightly less compute than the 1070Ti for example. While the ray-tracing stuff is pretty compelling, it remains to be seen how well supported it will be. Despite nVidia's implications that it will be easy to support, I imagine fundamental changes to the rendering model are going to also involve the artists re-lighting a lot of scenes, which could be a heavy lift, and slow adoption.

I'm interested but I'm probably going to wait 6 months for the dust to settle.

Don't confuse core counts with performance. My old GTX 780 has 2300 Cuda cores, compared to my GTX 1080's 2560. They aren't even close to each other in compute power.

[Tain]

It doesn't look to me like these cards are going to be a huge performance upgrade for traditional raster rendering. The 2070 seems to have slightly less compute than the 1070Ti for example. While the ray-tracing stuff is pretty compelling, it remains to be seen how well supported it will be. Despite nVidia's implications that it will be easy to support, I imagine fundamental changes to the rendering model are going to also involve the artists re-lighting a lot of scenes, which could be a heavy lift, and slow adoption.

I'm interested but I'm probably going to wait 6 months for the dust to settle.

Yeah, this is where I'm at.

[Rumpy]

Tomb Raider looks amazing.